For the 2013 edition of the Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival, artistic director Bonnie Rubenstein didn’t choose her exhibits based on the festival’s theme. Instead, she let the exhibits choose the theme.
An exhibit from London’s Archive of Modern Conflict and Genesis, the new show from celebrated Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado, were two of the first shows Rubenstein found for this year’s festival. Together, they inspired this year’s theme, Field of Vision.
“I started thinking about what it is these two things have in common,” she says. “And the archive has been collected for 20 years, and spans the history of photography and the entire globe. Salgado’s work was 10 years in the making and was shot around the world, and is this expansive, incredible project…And that’s how I came to this idea of Field of Vision. Photographic vision, artistic vision, it all came together and we went from there.” This year’s festival will consist of over 150 individual shows.
Salgado’s show is focused on places he calls “pristine.” It features pictures of remote landscapes and isolated communities from around the world. This is the first time his work has shown in Canada—it will be on display at the Royal Ontario Museum—which is a little odd, because several of the pictures in Genesis were shot here.
“I have a lot of pictures made inside this country, and you should be proud of Canada, because it is a marvelous country,” Salgado says.
Rubenstein knew the exhibit, which just had its first showing in the U.K. last month, would be a draw.
“I knew there was tremendous interest in Salgado in Toronto,” she says. “He’s never shown here, but we’ve shown films about him before and they’re always packed.”
Ottawa-based Andrew Wright is another photographer whose work will be shown at the festival. His exhibit, Penumbra, is as much about photographic technology as it is about the images themselves. To take the pictures in Penumbra, he used everything from smartphone apps to a giant camera obscura.
“This is a mid-career survey of work I’ve done in the last decade,” he says. “So I’ve done things like use the museum as a camera, turning some of the offices into a giant camera obscura, and making two works called ‘When Buildings Take Pictures of Themselves.’”
Ultimately, Rubenstein says that the goal of the CONTACT Festival is to change how Torontonians view both photography and the world around them.
“We want to create a dialogue with the city,” she says. “We want to enlighten people about the power of photography to influence how we think and see.”